How Political is the Personal?:
Identity Politics, Feminism and Social Change

Joan D. Mandle
Associate Professor of Sociology
Colgate University

jdmandle @ mail.colgate.edu

Second Wave Feminism

One of the best known and most important political slogans of the
early Women's Liberation Movement in which I was involved in the middle
1960s claimed that "the personal is political." That phrase was honed in
reaction to struggles within the 1960s social movements out of which the
Women's Liberation Movement first emerged. It captured the insight that
many of what were thought to be personal problems possessed social and
political causes, were widely shared among women , and could only be
resolved by social and political change.

In the l960s social movements - the Civil Rights Movement, the
movement against the War in Vietnam, and the student movement which called
for more student rights and decision-making power on college campuses -
women were central actors. Within all these movements, however, women
activists were denied the recognition and the responsibility that they
deserved and that they had earned. Despite their commitment and
contributions, they were all too often refused leadership positions,
treated as second class citizens, told to make coffee, and put on display
as sex objects. By the middle 1960s many of these women began to react to
and organize around the strong contradiction within social movements
which fought for self-determination and equality and yet which denied these
same basic rights within their own ranks. First in the civil rights
movement, with a statement written by Mary King and Casey Hayden, and soon
afterward and more frequently in the anti-war movement, SDS, and other
social movements, women radicals began to demand equity and respect as
activists.

The reaction of many of their male and female comrades seems
predictable in retrospect, but was shocking and demoralizing at the time.
Women's claims were met with derision, ridicule, and the political
argument that they were worrying about "personal" issues and in this way
draining movement effectiveness in fighting the "political" injustices of
racism and imperialism. How could women be so selfish, it was asked, to
focus on their personal disgruntlement when black people were denied
voting privileges in Mississippi, peasants were being napalmed in Vietnam,
and students were treated as numbers in large faceless bureaucratic
universities?

Movement women had no shortage of responses to these objections,
but the one that became a mantra of the new women's movement emerging out
of these struggles was the claim that personal lives - relationships with
friends, lovers, political comrades - were not personal at all but
characterized by power and fraught with political meaning. Women argued
that assumptions that they were followers and men leaders, that women
naturally were "better" with children and men "better" at organizing, that
women should type and men should discuss issues - that all these
assumptions were deeply political, denying women not only equality within
progressive movements, but even more basically the freedom to choose for
themselves what they could and should think and do. When most men and some
of the women involved within the 60s movements refused to listen, many
women left the movement to, as they put it at the time, "organize around
our own oppression." They began a liberation movement dedicated to
eliminating the ways in which women were constrained and harmed by sexist
assumptions and behavior.

By and large the early women's movement, emerging from a political
critique of what was defined as "personal" both in progressive movements
and in the wider society, pressed for the removal of the social barriers
and obstacles that had constrained women's choices. This was true with
respect to a wide range of issues including reproductive choice,
educational and occupational options, legal rights, as well as sexual
orientation and personal relationships. The movement was intent on
achieving social justice which it defined as providing women and men with
similar opportunities to grow, develop, express, and exercise their
potential as people. The political analysis underlying this vision of
personal fulfillment asserted that elimination of the sexism which pervaded
political and social institutional arrangements and attitudes was the best
way of ensuring that every one, regardless of sex, would have the ability
to exercise personal freedom.

Successes were many during those early years. The decades of the
60s and 70s were in fact characterized by enormous change in the range of
behavior and choices open to women in our society. Consciousness was
raised, and attitudes of both men and women underwent significant change
concerning women's capabilities and rights, while the notion of equality
between the sexes gained increased legitimacy. Change was especially rapid
in the law during those years. Indeed, Jane Mansbridge notes that had the
ERA been passed in l982, its effect would have been largely symbolic
because almost all sex-differentiated (sexist) laws which such an
amendment would have changed had already been altered by that time.

The social and political changes effected by the early women's
movement thus were in the service of a sex-neutral model of society. In
this, each individual would be afforded an equal opportunity to shape her
or his own life regardless of sex. The notion of gender difference was
deemphasized by a movement focused on equality, as women sought to gain
the right to fully participate in all aspects of society. Differences
between women and men, which had consistently been a central ideological
and behavioral component of limiting women to a separate stereotyped
"feminine" sphere, came under attack. The personal fact of one's sex
became an arena of political struggle, as increasing numbers of feminists
challenged the prevailing ideology that sex and gender were legitimate
constraints on the right to self-determination. Political justice
demanded that gender make no difference. Expectations were high that women
would achieve the freedom they had been denied and that sexism would be
defeated.

But in the 1980s much of this changed. The country as a whole
became more conservative in all areas of political life, as the Right,
with Ronald Reagan as its standard bearer, launched what Susan Faludi has
referred to as a "Blacklash" against the progressive changes of the
previous decades. As the gains of the women's movement began to slow, many
feminists became discouraged with the continuation of sexist attitudes and
behavior. The gap between incomes for women and men narrowed but remained
stubbornly persistent, abortion rights came under renewed attack, and
awareness of and concern about the extent of harassment and violence
against women increased. This latter ironically reflected the Women's
Movement's earlier success, for due to its efforts behavior previously
regarded as legally unproblematic, such as sexual harassment at work or
marital and date rape, was criminalized, and increased reporting of
violence occurred. In addition, growing numbers of women found themselves
doing what Arlie Hochschild has called the "Second Shift" - working at
full time jobs during the day and a second job at home as they continued
to assume most or all of the burden of home and child care in their
families. Finally, even though the 1970s were the heyday of the Movement,
increasing numbers of young girls at that time were being raised in poverty
because their single mothers' former husbands or lovers contributed nothing
to support them, were becoming painfully aware of the dangers of abuse,
rape, and sexual harassment, and were discouraged by their mothers
struggles with the double burden of work and family care. As these girls
matured into young women in the 1980s, many were far from convinced that
the women's movement had liberated anybody. All of these problems
affecting women seemed to fly in the face of feminism's promises and
expectations of equality, and some women, discouraged with the pace of
change and the persistence of sexism, reacted by retreating from claims
for equality and from demands for social change.

But as the 1980s progressed, it was not only feminists who were
experiencing disillusionment and increasing pessimism. In an era when the
conservative politics of Reaganism were dominant, the tragedy was that no
compelling alternative progressive world-view was being constructed. A
vision of a society of fairness and justice was not offered to counter the
conservative hegemony, and the attainment of an egalitarian society seemed
less and less possible.

Identity Politics

Out of this situation there emerged what has been called identity
politics, a politics that stresses strong collective group identities as
the basis of political analysis and action. As political engagement with
the society as a whole was increasingly perceived to have produced
insufficient progress or solutions, and in the absence of a compelling
model of a society worth struggling for, many progressives retreated into a
focus on their own "self" and into specific cultural and ideological
identity groups which made rights, status, and privilege claims on the
basis of a victimized identity. These groups included ethnic minorities
such as African-Americans, Asian- Americans, Native Americans, religious
groups, lesbian women and gay men, deaf and other disabled people. The
desire to gain sympathy on the basis of a tarnished identity was sometimes
taken to absurd lengths, as for example when privileged white men
pronounced themselves victims based on their alleged oppression by women
and especially by feminists. Indeed in the last decade there has been an
explosion of groups vying with one another for social recognition of their
oppression and respect for it. This has been especially exaggerated on
college campuses where young people have divided into any number of
separate identity groups.

Identity politics is centered on the idea that activism involves
groups' turning inward and stressing separatism, strong collective
identities, and political goals focused on psychological and personal
self-esteem. Jeffrey Escofier, writing about the gay movement, defines
identity politics in the following fashion:

"The politics of identity is a kind of cultural politics. It relies
on the development of a culture that is able to create new and affirmative
conceptions of the self, to articulate collective identities, and to forge
a sense of group loyalty. Identity politics - very much like nationalism -
requires the development of rigid definitions of the boundaries between
those who have particular collective identities and those who do not."

Many progressive activists today have come to base their political
analysis on collectively and often ideologically constructed identities
which are seen as immutable and all-encompassing. These identities, for
many, provide a retreat where they can feel "comfortable" and "safe" from
the assaults and insults of the rest of the society. Today it is the case
that many of those who profess a radical critique of society nonetheless
do not feel able, as activists in the 60s and 70s did, to engage people
outside their own self-defined group - either to press for improvement in
their disadvantaged status or to join in coalition. Identity politics
defines groups as so different from one another, with the gap dividing
them so wide and unbridgeable, that interaction is purposeless. Not only is
it assumed that working together will inevitably fail to bring progressive
change that would benefit any particular group. In addition, identity
groups discourage political contact because of their concern that the
psychological injury and personal discomfort they believe such contact
inevitably entails will harm individuals' self-esteem and erode their
identity.

Identity politics thus is zero-sum: what helps one group is thought
inevitably to harm another; what benefits them must hurt me. It is a
politics of despair. In the name of advancing the interests of one's own
group, it rejects attempts to educate, pressure, or change the society as
a whole, thus accepting the status quo and revealing its essentially
conservative nature. Identity politics advocates a retreat into the
protection of the self based on the celebration of group identity. It is a
politics of defeat and demoralization, of pessimism and selfishness. By
seizing as much as possible for one's self and group, it exposes its
complete disregard for the whole from which it has separated - for the rest
of the society. Identity politics thus rejects the search for a just and
comprehensive solution to social problems.

Feminism and Identity Politics

Like other progressive social movements, feminism has been deeply
affected by the growth of identity politics. Within feminism, identity
politics has taken two often-related forms which, together, I believe to
be hegemonic today. One is generally referred to as difference or
essentialist feminism, and the other as victim feminism. Difference
feminism emphasizes the unique identity of women as a group, stressing and
usually celebrating essential female characteristics which it believes make
women different from - indeed even opposite to - men. Victim feminism also
assumes that women have a unique identity, but the focus of that identity
is women's victimization on the basis of sex, typically at the hands of
men.

In defining difference feminism, Wendy Kaminer has stated that, by
suggesting that women differ from men in a myriad of ways, it identifies
"feminism with femininity." In what is perhaps the most influential version
of this ideology, popularized in the work of Carol Gilligan, difference
feminism emphasizes that women share "a different voice, different moral
sensibilities - an ethic of care." According to Kaminer, this notion of
female difference is attractive to feminists and non-feminists alike for a
number of reasons. Difference feminism appeals to some feminists, she
asserts, because it revalues previously devalued characteristics such as
emotionality and social connectedness which women are thought to embody. In
declaring female traits superior to those such as aggression and
rationality which characterize men, difference feminism seems to reject
sexism by turning it on its head. It thus provides a clear group identity
for women which stresses the way they are special.

According to Kaminer, difference feminism is also attractive to
feminists in another manner. She argues that it allows feminists to be
angry at men and challenge their hegemony without worrying that they are
giving up their femininity. Because they are socialized to fear the loss of
femininity, the advocacy of radical change in gender roles is deeply
threatening to many women, including feminists. Difference feminism's
reassertion of the value of femininity helps to assuage these fears and
thus seems to make feminism more acceptable. Finally, even some
non-feminists are drawn to difference feminism because it legitimates a
belief in immutable and natural sex differences, a central tenet of
conservative claims for support of the status quo. As noted above, this
conservative bias is a pivotal element of difference feminism.

What Naomi Wolf has called victim feminism also reinforces identity
politics, for victim feminism also assumes women's diametrical difference
from men as a central component of its view. According to victim feminism,
however, what is unique about women's difference is that they are powerless
to affect the victim status by which they are primarily defined. Wolf
argues that victim feminism "turns suffering and persecution into a kind of
glamour." The attractiveness of this model is partially due to the fact
that feminists understand all too well the discouraging reality that women
have been and continue to be victims of sexism, male violence, and
discrimination. But victim feminism is attractive to others primarily
because it absolves individuals of the political responsibility to act to
change their own condition. Its emphasis on personal victimization includes
a refusal to hold women in any way responsible for their problems. It thus
implies that, as a group, women are helpless in the face of the
overwhelming factors which force them to accept - however unhappily - the
circumstances in which they find themselves.

Such a view of women resonates with many non-feminists as well
because it pictures women as passive and in need of protection, a view
consistent with traditionally sexist ideas of women and femininity. And
finally, victim feminism is popular because it is consistent with the
explosion of self-help programs and talk shows where individuals -
disproportionately women - compete for public recognition of their claims
to personally victimized status. These shows try - all too successfully -
to convince their audiences and even perhaps their guests that exposing
personal problems on television is itself a solution to them, in this way
delegitimating the serious political changes which many such problems
require for their elimination.

The hegemony of identity politics within feminism, in my view, has
helped to stymie the growth of a large scale feminist movement which could
effectively challenge sexism and create the possibility of justice and
fairness in our society. On the one hand identity politics makes the
coalitions needed to build a mass movement for social change extremely
difficult. With its emphasis on internal group solidarity and personal
self-esteem, identity politics divides potential allies from one another.
Difference feminism makes the task for example of including men in the
struggle against sexism almost impossible, and even trying to change men's
behavior or attitudes is made to seem futile because of the assumption
that the sexes share so little. Indeed some difference feminists assert
that women and men are so different from one another that they can hardly
communicate across sex at all. The phrase "Men don't get it" too often
implies that they "can't" get it, because, it is argued by difference
feminists, only women have the capacity to really understand what other
women are talking about. This of course is nonsense without any empirical
validity, but identity politics so strongly stresses sex differences that
this has come to be the accepted wisdom.

But it is not just coalitions across sex that are assumed to be
impossible, but coalitions among women as well. One of the problems with
identity politics is that its assumptions can lead to an almost infinite
number of smaller and smaller female identity groups. Identity politics
puts a premium on valuing and exaggerating differences existing among women
as well as those that are cross-sex. This makes large and potentially
powerful feminist organizations difficult to sustain. One example of this
effect was the problem of fractionalization within the National Women Studies Association (NWSA) some
years ago, largely due to the many splits that occurred within its ranks.
Identity groups organized within the organization pitting academic women
against non-academic, Jewish women against non-Jews, women of color against
white women, lesbians against straight women, lesbians of color against
white lesbians, mothers against non-mothers and more. Each group focused on
its own identity, its own victimization which it set up in competition
with others' claims of victim status, and ins response to which it demanded
recognition and concessions from the organization. The center - if it
existed - simply could not hold and the organization, which had played a
very important role in creating and supporting women's studies programs on
campuses, was wracked by years of conflict from which it has only recently recovered.

Thus, by stressing the characteristics which divide us, the logic
of identity politics is that ultimately each individual is her own group.
If each individual is different from all others, then to protect herself
adequately she needs to be selfish - to ally with no one and to count only
on herself to protect her interests. It is obvious that this stance makes
it completely impossible to bring together the large numbers of people
necessary successfully to press for social change. Coalitions fail to
develop or are not even attempted. In this way, identity politics within
feminism, as elsewhere, is basically conservative, working against
progressive change and supporting the status quo.

The divisions promoted by identity politics are especially
pronounced today on college campuses. Not only between male and female
students but also among students of different racial and ethnic
backgrounds, differences are perceived as unbridgeable barriers and
victimized status is a badge of honor. It is especially ironic that this
separation is occurring at precisely the moment in history when real
differences among students are less pronounced than ever in the past.
American society is in fact culturally very homogeneous, as almost all
young Americans who attend college grow up watching the same television
programs, shopping at the same malls, listening to the same music, and
eating the same fast food for large portions of their lives. Beginning
salaries for students who graduate from elite universities have increasingly become similar by race and sex. But
the identity politics which is hegemonic on such elite college campuses
emphasizes difference above all else, even when students have trouble
actually articulating what, in concrete terms, those significant
differences are.

The focus of attention within the context of identity politics
becomes building solidarity and loyalty within one's own group. The outcome
divides students from one another. Female students of different ethnic
groups, for example, come to see themselves as having nothing in common
with one another, and to compete over their relative degree of
victimization. Feminist women of color, for example, on many campuses
including Colgate's separate from white feminists, and take as a major
task the goal of criticizing and creating guilt in white women students for
their alleged racist attitudes. Similarly, within groups of women of color
the same process occurs, with different ethnic groups dividing off and
emphasizing the large differences among them. On other campuses, it is
lesbian women who claim an especially oppressed status and, stressing their
differences from straight women, critique the attitudes and behavior of
heterosexual women towards them. Regardless of the merit of any particular
critique, this model of identity politics effectively divides from one
another those who could be allies in facing the many real problems - of
poverty, violence, reproductive control, and work/ family conflicts - that
women share when facing the world outside the university. Though in fact
female college students share large numbers of issues around which they
could build an inclusive movement to attack sexist behavior and attitudes,
they turn inward, reinforcing their own feelings of victimization and
loyalty, and typically turn outward only to attack one another.

In addition to dividing potential allies from one another, identity
politics' dominance of feminism creates other obstacles to effective
struggles for social change. Its focus on personal identity produces a kind
of a-political narcissism. Its attempt is to redefine politics as the
attempt to know and assert "who I am" as part of a specifically narrow
group. The notion that politics should involve responsibility toward others
as well as toward oneself and toward whatever one defines as one's "own
group" has been lost. The assertion of one's selfhood, concern with one's
own self-esteem, as well as group loyalty become ends, the primary goals of
political expression. In addition to its inward-looking focus, the strong
emphasis on group loyalty characteristic of identity politics creates
exaggerated emotional dependence on the group and consequently enormous
pressure towards conformity and away from dissenting or independent
thought. Stephen Carter, in his Confessions of An Affirmative Action Baby,
exposes the damage done to independent and creative individual thinking
that such a situation produces, again especially on college campuses.
This exaggerated loyalty, then, also serves as an obstacle to the creation
of an inclusive and thoughtful feminist politics.

The Future of Feminism

So where do we go from here? It is no doubt clear from my
presentation today that my own politics are in strong contrast to identity
politics. For a successful progressive politics to emerge again in our
society, I believe that we need to create a political atmosphere where the
zero-sum model of group competition gives way to coalitions among
progressive groups to work on specific social problems; where personal
issues of identity and self-esteem do not stymie individuals and groups'
abilities to act politically; and where a unifying vision of fairness and
social justice replaces the pessimistic focus on difference.

For those of you who agree with me, we have a difficult but
important task in front of us. Difficult especially now as we see in so
many parts of the world from Kosovo to Rwanda the strength of identity
politics in the form of nationalism - whether organized on religious, or
cultural, or regional grounds - as a rallying cry for the most inhumane
acts of violence among neighbors. Our task, then, does seem to run counter
to a deep-seated tendency for human beings to react with fear and even
hatred to differences, whether those differences are real, socially
created, or imagined. For those of you who believe as I do, our task is to
convince individuals and groups mired in the search for and affirmation of
difference and victimization that it is in their interests to alter the
sources of their victimization by joining with others to create a just
society for all. This is not to say that individual or group conflicts
will or can completely disappear. There are legitimate conflicts of
interest in any society. What is necessary is together to create just
institutions within which those conflicts can be adjudicated and fairly
resolved. Indeed we must recognize that the only possible solution to the
legitimate problems and conflicts groups face is such a broad movement for
social justice.

For feminism, these issues presently constitute a crisis of
definition, as well as a choice about how to proceed. In Fire With Fire,
Naomi Wolf offers a number of different definitions of feminism. Two
however seem particularly instructive in the present context. In one
portion of the book she advocates a definition of feminism that focuses on
difference, on "more for women," including anything as feminist that
"makes women stronger in ways that each woman is entitled to define for
herself" and allowing that a woman is a feminist if she "respects herself"
and is "operating at her full speed." This identity and difference-oriented
definition is one direction in which feminism may continue to go. Feminists
in this view would include Phyllis Schlafly and Margaret Thatcher for surely
they respect themselves and believe they have defined ways to make women
stronger. This brand of feminism would focus on getting more for women
regardless of the implication for others and would advocate the use of
their newly attained power for good or evil, as they individually decide.
For reasons outlined in this paper, I reject this view.

In the same book, however, Wolf proposes another definition of
feminism. Here she emphasizes feminism's essence as a movement for a
socially more just society. This then is the other possible direction that
feminism today could take, reaching out to others who share a commitment to
a just and egalitarian society and building the coalitions necessary to
exercise the power to move in that direction. Concrete examples of such
possibilities abound. Poor women, especially the young who cannot afford
abortions, could join with middle class pro-choice advocates in pressing
for the federal funding necessary if all women are to have real
reproductive control. The crisis in day care - both its inadequate
availability and quality - has the potential to unite working parents of
all ethnicities and social classes. Issues such as rape, battering, and
sexual harassment cut across class and race and age, pointing the way to
broad-based coalitions of women and men who are outraged by these crimes.
And the continued low-pay, dead end, and sex stereotyped jobs in which
women find themselves could be addressed as part of the broader fight for
better education and higher paying jobs in the American economy as a whole,
as feminists join with unions and other advocates of higher incomes for
working people.

These and other issues have the potential of combining the
political influence of disparate groups which can agree on specific issues
and are willing to work together to effect concrete change in the
functioning of our laws and institutions. As we look to our future, we
also need to be cognizant of our past. In the early 1960s when the Second
Wave of feminism began, the women's movement was separate, but at the same
time part of a larger number of groups - Civil Rights, anti-war, New Left,
student groups - committed to and optimistic about constructing a more
just society for all. These earliest feminists understood that women's
personal problems had social origins and that they thus required political
solutions, necessarily involving the entire society. If today we focus only
on ourselves, our differences, and on our own victimization, we risk
repeating the mistake made by feminism in the later l960s and early 1970s.
At that time, some feminist activists began using small consciousness
raising groups in a therapeutic fashion, as a way of focusing primarily on
their own personal problems. Discouraged about the extent of sexism they
had uncovered and demoralized by seeing themselves as its victims, they
turned inward, preoccupied with the personally damaging effects of sexism.
They abandoned consciousness raising groups as a way of linking themselves
with others, as a way of connecting personal issues to political activism
in the wider society. Isolated from larger struggles for social justice,
most consciousness raising groups collapsed within a very short number of
years.

Today's identity politics, both in the form of difference and
victim feminism, poses a similar danger to a successful struggle to
overcome sexism. The personal in these contexts is not political, primarily
because it involves separation from political engagement with others in
society. Rather it accepts the pessimistic - ultimately conservative -
view that victimization is not amenable to change through political
struggle. It accepts the notion that difference between women and men makes
coalition impossible and sexism inevitable. In contrast, we need to affirm
the early women's movements' insight that the personal - sexism in personal
relationships, the tragedy of sexual violence or abuse, the division of
housework within families, or the poverty that women disproportionately
experience - can be an important factor in creating a politics of
engagement. By so doing, we can join with others to construct a vision and
politics that promises real democratic participation, self-determination,
and egalitarian justice for all.